How to Group by Conversation in Outlook 2010

If you use an email provider in a Web browser, like Gmail, then it’s possible that your emails are currently grouped by conversation.

If you like this behavior and wish to use it in Microsoft Outlook on your computer, too, then you are able to do so.

Our tutorial will show you how to group by conversation in Outlook 2010 by following a few short steps.

How to Use Microsoft Outlook Conversation Grouping

  1. Open Outlook.
  2. Choose the folder to modify.
  3. Select the View tab.
  4. Check the Show as Conversations box.
  5. Choose All folders or This folder.

Our guide continues below with additional information on how to group by conversation in Outlook 2010, including pictures of these steps.

As more and more of our personal and business conversations take place by email, our inboxes are starting to get pretty cluttered.

Aside from leading to Outlook file size bloat (which you can partially combat by learning how to delete items on exit in Outlook), it just means that there are more and more messages in your folders that you do not need or that are preventing you from quickly finding your important messages.

But you can make an effort to resolve this problem by learning how to group your messages by conversation in Outlook 2010.

If you have a lot of threaded messages in Outlook this can be a very helpful feature which will reduce the amount of time you spend looking for messages.

Grouping Messages by Conversation in Outlook 2010 (Guide with Pictures)

Note that applying this sorting method to your inbox will not remove or affect the messages that are stored in your Outlook folders. And if you don’t like how it changes your display options, you can easily turn it off and return to the default folder view in Outlook.

Step 1: Launch Outlook 2010.

Step 2: Click the message folder that you want to sort by conversation (probably your inbox, but your needs may vary.)

Step 3: Click the View tab at the top of the window.

outlook 2010 view tab

Step 4: Check the box to the left of Show as Conversations in the Conversations section of the ribbon at the top of the window.

how to group messages by conversation in outlook 2010

Step 5: Click the This folder option to display all conversations in that folder as conversations.

You can also choose the All folders option if you want to apply this setting to every folder in Outlook.

apply sorting to folder

All of the messages in your folder will then be sorted by conversation. Conversations with multiple messages will display a little arrow to the left of the conversation that you can click to see the rest of the messages.

Now that you know how to group by conversation in Outlook 2010, you can use this setting to make it easier to see all of the messages that are part of a single email thread in Outlook

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